What the Leonardo horse
brings to the point of startle—
not only for its intrinsic capacity to overwhelm
but for the shuddering suddenness of its appearance,
like water springing up in a desert---is artistic energy.

This is energy notched up to a degree
to which we have grown so unaccustomed
that it seems a revelation.

There is to the horse a density of power,
a concentrated capability to invoke dreaming.
This is not an image of a horse,
not a metaphor, not a study—
it is extremely a horse.

It is a horse intensified, a horse raised to a higher
power,
a power of vision, of conception, of apprehension. In
short,
it is art as pure passion and as the ability to instill
it---

not a fashion of art,
and not art after a fashion,
but an erotics of art.